Babylon South

by Jon Cleary

  “How do these policemen get so out of hand? I’ll get on to John Leeds.” So much could be done with a phone call, if one knew the right number. History is full of networks; all that differs is the scale and the instrument. Business leaders and bureaucrats have replaced kings and ambassadors, the phone has replaced the post-chaise and the king’s messenger. “He’ll call off Malone and that other one, the big slob, Sergeant What’s-his-name.”

  “Won’t that make Malone more suspicious? I saw him the other night at the International at Double Bay. He was with someone, probably his wife. They were discussing me. Do you think cops tell their wives about their cases?”

  “Probably. She’s probably some dowdy little mum, it’d be the only excitement in her dull little life.”

  “She’s not dowdy. She’s beautiful and very smart-looking.”

  “How did he manage it? I’ll have to have another look at him. He looked and sounded so suburban.” She was deliberately sounding casual, frivolously snobbish. Justine had to be protected; she recognized there was less steel in her daughter than in herself. “Don’t worry. John will take care of it.”

  “Mother, this is murder!” It’s not a traffic ticket—I haven’t been pulled up by the booze bus—Malone thinks I killed Emma!”

  “Has he said so?”

  “No-o. But I know what he’s thinking. And so does Nana. You ask her. It all has something to do with me borrowing that gun, the Walther or whatever it was. I’m frightened, Mother.”

  “Nothing will happen to you, I promise.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  But Venetia couldn’t answer that. She was standing on shifting sands, financially and emotionally. Life, all at once, was turning into a bad dream, though she had never been a dreamer but a doer.

  She stood up, kissed Justine, then paused and looked out through the glass walls. Across the water, shining like the black glass here in the apartment, she could see the lights of Kirribilli nesting like electric gulls in the apartment-cliffs. “The harbour always looks so peaceful at night.”

  “I sometimes sit here and look out at it and read Kenneth Slessor’s Five Bells. It’s not just about the harbour, it’s about the death of a friend, but he gives me the picture.”

  Venetia looked carefully at her. “I’ve never read it.”

  “It goes:

  “And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard

  Was a boat’s whistle, and the scraping squeal

  Of seabirds’ voices far away, and bells,

  Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out.”

  She stopped, embarrassed; she had not recited poetry aloud since she had left school.

  Venetia looked at this sudden stranger. “You read poetry? You never told me.”

  “There’s a lot I haven’t told you. You never had time to listen.”

  There was nothing to say to that, no defence except the retreat of, “Good-night, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  She went down in the lift, looking in the mirrors for some recognition of herself. But there was a stranger there, too: she could not believe she knew the puzzled uncertain woman who looked back at her with her own eyes.

  She got out of the lift and literally bumped into Peter Polux. Instinctively she looked down at his feet. He was wearing black shoes: he was still in mourning for his lost fortune.

  “Venetia, old girl—” He sounded like a desperate salesman. “I’ve been ringing you at your office all this week—”

  “I know, Mr. Polux. There’s nothing we have to talk about. Save your money—you need it.”

  She stepped past him before he could reply, and went out of the lobby. She had made a huge error of judgement with him and she did not like reminders of her mistakes.

  As she came out of The Wharf and paused on the footpath before crossing the road to the Springfellow building, where Leyden and the Bentley would be waiting for her, a man all at once appeared beside her. He was a burly man, older than herself, with a battered face split by a mocking grin.

  “Night, missus. You wouldn’t have a dollar for a cuppa coffee?”

  “Don’t bother me or I’ll shout for a policeman.”

  “Ain’t none around here or I wouldn’t of asked you.” The man looked round him, the mocking grin still on his face. “I’m not gunna rape you or anything, missus. All I asked for is a dollar. You look as if you could afford it.”

  She hesitated, then she opened her wallet and gave him a two-dollar note. “Are you broke?”

  “No,” said the man. “But this beats working. You’d be surprised how many kind-hearted people there are like you.”

  “Balls,” she said and stepped off the kerb and began to cross the road.

  “Thanks,” he called after her. “You’re a real lady!”

  “I know,” said Lady Springfellow.

  III

  Chilla Dural watched her go. He was planning a kidnapping and hadn’t yet decided who the victim should be: Lady Springfellow or her daughter. The idea had come to him yesterday when he had paid his fortnightly call on Les Glizzard.

  “Chilla, you’ve got to get a grip on yourself. You’ve been kidnapped by apathy.”

  “Kidnapped?”

  “Yes, by apathy. And apathy leads to despair. Or vice versa.” Les Glizzard knew that the emotions went in a circle, but he was not sure if they went clockwise or anti-clockwise. Night school sociology was often dim-sighted in the bright light of day.

  “What’s the ransom?” said Dural, a practical-minded man.

  “Ransom? Who’s talking about ransom?”

  “You are. You were talking about kidnapping.”

  “Chilla, it was a figure of speech,” said Glizzard, close to despair and battling apathy; sometimes towards the end of the week he wondered if his work and devotion were all worthwhile. “I’m trying to save you from yourself. You never did a kidnap job, did you?”

  Dural shook his head. “It’s never really been worth it in Australia. Not up till now, not like in the States. But I suppose with the money that’s around now . . .”

  “Don’t even think about it!”

  “Don’t think about what? What are you up to now, Chilla?”

  Tom Binder had come into Glizzard’s tiny office. He was the senior probation officer, a small dried-out man with a cowlick and black-rimmed glasses that camouflaged the shrewdest eyes in the business. Chilla Dural thought he would have made a top boss if he’d been a crim: he could think of no higher compliment.

  “We were talking about kidnapping,” said Glizzard, looking at Dural with disappointment.

  Binder sat on the edge of Glizzard’s desk, lit a cigarette and coughed two or three times. He had been in the Department of Corrective Services for almost thirty years, long before it had been given such a new-fangled, sociologically-oriented title: he was one of the old school who called a spade a spade or a darky, a crim a crim and bugger the soft approach. He suspected he would die of lung cancer, but he still smoked two packets of cigarettes a day and to hell with the new government directive that there was to be no smoking in work areas. He and Chilla Dural understood each other and the way the real world worked.

  “Chilla, you’re not working along those lines, are you? It’s different from when you went in—they’re tougher now. You kidnap someone and before you can name the ransom, they’d have the SWAT boys and the Tactical Response fellers surrounding you with shotguns and tear gas and Christ knows what. They’d fill you so full of holes you’d look like my wife’s knitting.”

  Dural grinned. “You just talked me outa it, Mr. Binder. No, it was just a—figure of speech, right?”

  He looked at Glizzard, who nodded. “Right. We were talking about apathy, Tom.”

  “What’s that? Is that what I feel every Monday morning when I come in here?”

  “Well, not exactly,” said Glizzard, who came in every Monday with enthusiasm that had been stoked up over the weekend. He would never give up striving to rehabilitate the crimina
l classes; he would have been in seventh heaven in convict days with all that material on his doorstep. He had read Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore and it had thrilled him as much as if it had been a book of erotica.

  “Stay out of trouble, Chilla,” said Binder through a cloud of smoke. “Don’t make us start another file on you. You buggers have no idea how much paperwork you cause. How are you holding out for cash?”

  “I’ve got enough, Mr. Binder. I can always hold up a bank if I run short.”

  “Well, don’t get caught. Or you might get hurt. Look at those buggers out at Leichhardt the other day. One dead and two in hospital. That could happen to you. It’ll only mean more paperwork for us.”

  He stood up, winked and went out of the office, dry as the smoke he left behind him. If ever he turned crooked, Dural thought, I’d go to work for him.

  “A good bloke,” he told Glizzard.

  “I suppose so,” said Glizzard. “He’s just so old-fashioned in his ideas, that’s all. He’s not what you’d call state-of-the-art.”

  “What?”

  That had been yesterday. He had gone home with the word kidnap tickling his brain like mental lice. As he had let himself in the front door Jerry Killeen, the gatekeeper of the hallway, had opened his door.

  “G’day, Chilla. I was just gunna make a cuppa. How about one?” He was holding a copy of the Mirror; Dural saw the headline: KIDNAP! It hit him like an omen. “Come in. I just got some fresh cakes, good old-fashioned ones, none of the Frog patsy-whatever-it-is stuff.”

  Dural followed him into the room. Up till now he had managed to dodge the invitations; he knew the little old man had sometimes been hurt, but he had never been openly resentful. He was the lonely sort who was ever hopeful that someone would recognize him; Dural had seen dozens like him over the years in Parramatta.

  “Siddown. Here, have a look at the paper while I put the kettle on.”

  He tossed the paper at Dural, who caught it and opened it. The kidnapping story was not a local one; this was the early edition, when most of the stories were cable items. A minor TV star, someone Dural had never heard of, had been kidnapped in Los Angeles; the victim played a cop in a series and the kidnapping was a real-life replay of a series episode. Since Dural could never tell one TV star from another, he wondered if the series producers would bother to pay the ransom demanded; they would probably cast another look-alike actor and the kidnappers would be left with an actor who no longer rated. He put the paper aside; then picked it up again. The name Springfellow had caught his eye.

  “Take it with you,” said Killeen, spooning tea into a chipped china pot. “I’ve read it. Dunno why I buy it, there’s nothing in it.”

  Dural folded the paper for later reading, then looked around the room. This was Killeen’s home: one room with, it seemed, his life papering the walls. Dural had never seen so many photographs: family groups, army groups, football teams, single photos of Killeen at various ages. The room was meticulously neat and clean; just like Killeen himself. Dural’s cell at Parramatta had been as neat and clean, but there had been no walls of photographs. Only the one of Patti and the girls.

  “You looking at the footy pictures, eh?” Dural hadn’t been, but now he did so out of politeness. “I used to play scrum-half for Western Suburbs back in the Forties. You probably remember me?”

  “Killeen? Oh sure, I never connected . . .” He couldn’t remember a single footballer from that long ago.

  The old man beamed as if he had just figured in the Honours List. He put down a plate of cakes on the small table between him and Dural; they were fresh, but they reminded Dural of the cakes he had eaten back in the Forties or even before. There was even a Chester cake, that heavy cube of pastry and pudden filling that, if one bought enough of them, could be used to build a house. The two men sat down and, like schoolboys, bogged into the museum fare.

  “Waddia gunna do for Christmas dinner?” said Killeen, wiping mock-cream from his chin, “I always go to the Salvos. They turn on a good spread.”

  “I dunno,” said Dural cautiously. He didn’t want to spend Christmas Day with a lot of other lost souls at a Salvation Army hostel. He had begun to think of himself as a lost soul only since Les Glizzard had told him not to. He tried a quick lie: “My probation officer wants me to have it with him. I might do it, just to keep him happy.”

  They drank tea, ate cakes and chatted for another twenty minutes. Then Dural decided he had given the old man enough of his company. He stood up, picking up the paper, and opened the door. He had never been one who didn’t know how to make a quick exit. A good many times, a quick exit had been obligatory if he hadn’t wanted his head kicked in.

  “Thanks, Jerry. See you another time.”

  “You gotta go? I’ll put the kettle on again, make a fresh cuppa—”

  “No, thanks. See you.”

  He closed the door on the wrinkled, disappointed face, feeling a right bastard but knowing the right time to escape. As he opened his own door he sniffed, turning his face towards the back stairs that led to the upper floors. The Vietnamese were frying rice again; they must have retreated from trying to be dinkum Aussies. He wondered what they would think of Jerry Killeen’s good old-fashioned cakes, especially the Chester cake. One of them lay in his stomach, having smashed a couple of ribs on the way down.

  In his room he opened up the Mirror. The feature article on the financial page dealt with the Springfellow holdings; it was evidently one of a series on tall poppies that had been lopped in the Crash. There were pictures of Lady Springfellow and her daughter Justine: two good sorts, if ever he’d seen „em. He didn’t take in all that the article tried to tell him; bloody economics writers wrote for each other. But he got the gist of it: Venetia Springfellow (Venetia and Justine? Patti would have loved those names) had done a packet in the stock market crash. She was still worth at least five hundred million, give or take ten or twenty million. It only proved, said the writer, the difference between the rich and the wealthy. The wealthy could go bankrupt, but the rich never.

  Dural looked at the two women: which one would be easier to snatch? And how would he go about it? The actual snatch might be the easiest part of the exercise; kidnappers were usually caught when they tried to collect the ransom. He would have to work that out, get the old brain working again. It was a pity Heinie Odets was dead: Heinie had been a great one for solving problems. Of course the object would be to get caught, but so far down the track that the do-gooder Les Glizzard couldn’t interfere.

  The first thing, though, was to get to know the routine of the Springfellows, mother and daughter.

  And so, tonight, he was standing outside the apartment building where the daughter lived when who should come out but Lady Springfellow herself. He had looked her up and down, seen the slight breeze coming down the narrow gorge of Phillip Street and moulding her dress against her body and thighs and got a surge of feeling in his crotch. She’d be the one to take, someone more his own age. She was the one with the money, too.

  He began to make plans.

  8

  I

  “INSPECTOR—”

  “G’day, Andy, where’ve you been? I thought you’d resigned from the Department or something.”

  “I’ve been following those suggestions you gave me.” Andy Graham grinned; he had learned that you could relax with Malone, just so long as you did your job. “The Feds have been really helpful on this one.”

  Malone looked across at Clements. “Do they owe us something?”

  “I don’t think so.” All the police forces, State and Federal, were fiercely independent, sometimes even mistrustful, of each other. They were bureaucracies and being in uniform made them no different from other bureaucracies. Clements, a State chauvinist, had no time for Canberra. “The PM must be calling an election and is looking for votes.”

  “Who’d vote for Phil Norval except little old ladies?”

  Andy Graham waited while his two seniors discussed Canberr
a. Then he said, “At the same time as Walter Springfellow disappeared, a Third Secretary from the Russian embassy went into smoke. The same weekend, March 27 and 28, 1966.”

  “You get his name?”

  Graham looked at his notes. “Alexis Uritzsky. According to the Federal, the Russians never issued a comment. They did inform External Affairs, as it was then, that he’d been recalled to Moscow for personal reasons.”

  “Did anyone make a connection between his and Springfellow’s disappearance?”

  “I don’t know. I guess only ASIO would know that. I tried contacting them, but they just brushed me off. I don’t think they talk to detective-constables.”

  Malone grinned at Clements. “We’ll try a higher rank, see how we go. Right, Andy. Good work. See if you can dig up anything more on—what’s his name?—Uritzsky.”

  “Right.”

  After Graham had galloped away, Malone picked up his phone and dialled the Herald and asked for the editor-in-chief. “Jack Montgomery? Jack, this is Scobie Malone. Could I drop in to see you for a few minutes?”

  “So long as it’s in the next hour. After that I’ve got to look as if I’m working.”

  Fifteen minutes later Malone and Clements walked into the Herald building uptown and went up to Editorial on the sixth floor. Jack Montgomery, tall and stooped, grey-haired and slow-talking, looking and sounding more like a battling farmer than one of the most highly regarded newspapermen in the country, took his feet down off his desk as the two detectives came into his office. He took his pipe out of his mouth, a major concession.

  “They never had editors-in-chief when I first started as a copy boy. I still don’t know what it means, but it’s a nice-sounding title and they don’t expect you to work too hard. What can I do for you?” He put his pipe back in his mouth, where it would remain for the rest of the conversation.

  Malone introduced Clements and then came straight to the point, explaining that he was working on both the Springfellow murders. “Jack, you were in Canberra in the 1960s, weren’t you?”